Hello, everyone! I’m Dmitry, a 28-year-old guy from Russia, and I’d like to share with you my solo, no-budget, three-year-long journey of making a sci-fi adventure game called Supposedly Wonderful Future on Unity. It turned into quite a lengthy beast, but I hope you will find it interesting and engaging enough to justify a long read. Though I don’t consider myself an authority on anything, I’d be glad to respond to every comment, answer any question, and write some smaller, accompanying walls of text below. Thanks!

Let me start by saying that I have very specific gaming tastes. More precisely: I need a good plot. With twists and intrigue, ideas and messages, well-written dialogues, careful world-building, witty jokes, with characters that make you care, drama that sends you riding the feels train, and so on, and all that jazz. I wouldn’t say “no” to quality gameplay either, and I believe that interactivity is one of the video games’ strongest assets, but the story comes first.

All of the above can be considered a theoretical ideal I set my sights on as a developer. Story-driven games aren’t a very common choice among indies (there are visual novels, but they kinda exist in their own world, and even they frequently concentrate on dating simulation rather than on deep complex stories); even so, there was no doubt in my mind as to what kind of game I wanted to make. After all, if you plan to spend three years creating something, you’d better maximize your chances of loving it personally, right?

Three years? How about money to buy food and stuff?

Good question. Though by no means unique or even exceedingly rare in this day and age (I’ve seen folks who’ve been soloing much longer than me on this very subreddit in the last few weeks alone), it’s still not the most popular career decision in the world, and I want to state clearly from the start that I only did so because: a) I could afford it; b) that’s how the circumstances turned out to be.

I was writing a commercial web app with .NET MVC, employed remotely by a British software development company while living in Russia, and the difference in average salaries made it a very good job for saving up. At the same time, that job was starting to slowly but surely fall apart, while searching for a replacement turned into a hella lengthy process, so I spent a few months in a rather bored state of mind – and we all know that boredom is a good fuel for unexpected wild ideas.

Furthermore, I was lucky enough to find myself with a number of useful gamedev-related skills on my hands. My university degree had nothing to do with games, only with programming, yet my graduation project about e-learning went for gamification angle and ended up featuring a 3d web build made in Unity, so I was already familiar with the engine. English, though not my native language, was ingrained in my mind after a decade of constant exposure, so I was fairly confident about my ability to write decent dialogues and cohesive narratives.

Last but not least, analyzing video games’ stories in my head was one of my favorite pastimes, and extensive browsing of a great place called TV Tropes helped me to better understand common story-building blocks without succumbing to a cynical, “it’s all just a bunch of cliches” attitude. There were still areas where I had to start from scratch, mostly related to visuals (more on this in the lower parts), but at least it didn’t feel like I was trying to get another degree all by myself.

On game design and focus

During those boring months, I thought a lot about my idea of an “ideal job”. How I enjoy programming but always see it as a tool to reach specific goals, rather than an exciting field all by itself. How fascinated I am with storytelling in modern media, and its ever-growing effect on our daily lives. How I myself was supported, inspired, and motivated by fictional stories every step of the way, and wanted to give back. How I always genuinely liked video games and toyed with an idea of making my own, only to conclude that it’s just unrealistic for a one-man effort to include all those things a serious story-driven game should have…

…except that, with 2014 on the calendar, it kinda wasn’t. There was a shift in how people approached game design now; a certain new level of maturity video games achieved as a medium. Or maybe it mostly happened in my head, but it was an important thought to me nonetheless. I remember playing Russian games from the early 2000s and seeing diamonds in the rough buried under bugs and deadlines; labors of love whose reach invariably exceeded their grasp.

Single-player, multiplayer, innovative gameplay, thoughtful stories, elaborate visuals, vast 3d environments, cutscenes, voice acting – they did it all with mixed success, and not necessarily because they wanted to include that much, but because a game was SUPPOSED to include that much. Publishers preferred it this way too, I imagine; when “shipping a game” means actual shipping of thousands of physical copies (!) to individual stores all across this ridiculously big country, there’s a natural limit to the risks you might want to take.

But the broadband kept rolling, the software was advancing, the indie games have bloomed, and a different kind of approach started to occupy my mind. You start with a question – “Why, what’s the point?” – and answer with one short sentence. You go in as modest as possible, focusing solely on that sentence, and then you polish it day in and day out like a samurai, without cutting corners, as much as real life allows you.

Now, that approach is quite suitable for a one-man band, isn’t it? So I thought to myself: as much as I’d like to release my own Mass Effect tomorrow, let’s follow this route. Let’s try to excel at one specific thing, and discard everything that doesn’t directly affect it. Let’s tell a story worth telling.

So what kind of story is it?

A young man is invited to skip his own untimely death by time traveling into 2046 – if only he does some work for a megacorporation first… That’s the logline I wrote for it, anyway. Why this particular premise? Surprisingly enough, I don’t have a clear answer. I could explain you the reasoning behind 99% of the story in excruciating detail, but the basic framework, the “why it starts and how it ends” stuff? That was more like a spontaneous idea than a carefully planned action, popping into my head one day and then growing and growing until it affected everything, like in that Inception movie.

There is an interesting thought among writers: the story writes itself, driven by characters’ personalities, basic setting, and other things outlined from the start, while you are merely discovering the details. I’m not sure I can embrace the notion, but I definitely felt the power of internal logic throughout my writing experience.

Then again, internal or not, I was always big on logic. My university education, though mostly related to automation and programming, had a number of more theoretical courses on math, logic, and systems thinking, which heavily influenced the way I view the world. Computer software is not the only kind of complex systems – a fictional narrative is too, as is human society, as is the entire universe. Everything around us is a system with its variables, elements, interconnections, and dependencies. That might the reason why I went for sci-fi, and why I enjoyed building the plot up until it resembled a decently-structured system on its own.

On a somewhat related note, I wanted it to be psychological and existential enough too. It sounds awkward when I put it so bluntly, like I’m snobbishly trying to elevate my stuff to a higher level where “serious art” resides, but if I’m being honest with myself, art or not, that’s just the kind of stories I like. There are complicated, uncomfortable things inherent to human condition that affect our reasoning and influence even our most mundane decisions, and if you’re in a business of writing believable stories with realistic characters, I don’t think you can afford to ignore it – on the contrary, you need to stare it directly in the eyes.

Depression and anxiety, self-doubt and escapism, clashing worldviews, social tensions, and our eternal quest for the ever-elusive happiness – all of this is explored in the game to some capacity, and though it will probably limit my audience (“I have enough of this crap in real life, thank you very much”, some might say, and who can blame them?), I still wouldn’t have it any other way.

Having said that, I really don’t want my game to come across as moody, pretentious, or oh-so-deep. I tried to keep my writing as casual and down-to-earth as possible, and there’s a decent share of light-hearted or downright silly stuff in it as well. There’s a character who always talks like Doc Brown from Back to the Future. There’s an agile management framework called SCREW and its 12-rule manifesto (I’ve been following those guidelines myself, and let me assure you, it’s a killer). There’s a penguin and a badger who try to stop Betelgeuse from going supernova by using their waffle (it makes sense in the context… sort of). I guess one way to put it is to call it a story that doesn’t get too serious – until it does.

Constants and variables and choice

Another far-reaching thing was my decision to tell the story through RPG-like conversations. You know, those old-school dialogue trees like in Dragon Age or Neverwinter Nights where every chunk of text from NPCs is followed by a numbered list of possible responses for you to choose from. My reasoning was simple: if you have a fixed narrative but still want to make the experience more involving and engaging than reading a book, dialogue options is one of the easiest and most natural ways to do it. “Choices matter” is a tag I will never see next to my game, but a smart illusion of choice? The one that eventually leads to the same outcome but still puts you in characters’ shoes and makes you consider their options? That was something I could try.

Then again, I’ve gotten rather fascinated with illusions, whether they were visual or narrative. I used to play games like Mass Effect and think: why even allow the player to act as a total jerk if they still have to do all the noble, heroic, world-saving stuff in the end? Now I believe that such options are important regardless of whether you actually use them or not; that they achieve their purpose simply by being there. I mean, sure, you can easily shatter the illusion to pieces if you reload or google some videos, but during that first, most important try, doesn’t it feel remarkably similar to real life?

After all, we can never truly predict the importance of our daily decisions; we just choose one of many options, while all other doors remain closed and unexplored. Maybe they could lead you to a whole different life. Or maybe there was a solid wall behind all of them, and you never really had any other choice. So I decided to stick to my guns and give every conversation a negative or ambivalent option, superficial as it might be. I even came up with a line for my bullet-pointed list of features: “Neat roleplaying opportunities! Be a compassionate smartass, a cynical smartass, or just plain “hey look how funny I am” smartass. Or don’t be a smartass at all, I guess, but why would anyone want that?” It sounds extremely cheeky, so I decided against using it, but to be honest, it’s kinda accurate.

Consequently, implementing my own dialogue tree graphs was the very first – and probably the most exciting – bit of programming I did. It turned out simple and manageable enough: just a bunch of XML files storing text lines with IDs, coupled with binary files containing the logic of how those IDs should connect. Building a customizable, decent-looking UI to support it all was a much longer endeavor (Unity UI system has a number of idiosyncrasies and not-so-obvious details), and became the longest block of code in the game. The rest was more or less straightforward and consisted mostly of OnClick behavior scripts – after all, mechanic-wise, I was making an extremely simplistic game.

Even with all the simplicity around, however, I was thoroughly reminded just how quickly your variables can pile up and spawn bugs. It took me about 2-3 months to go from “all the content is there and should be theoretically working” to “I think I’m confident enough to release it”, and every testing session supplied me with at least a couple of freshly discovered bugs. Trying to predict user actions is something that any software engineer should try to do, but I think video games take the cake here, probably because of how many different buttons players can press at any given moment (as opposed to, say, websites, where you mostly just click on stuff).

I can only imagine how freaking hard it is to properly stabilize vast, open-world RPGs full of interconnected quests and NPC lines (all those buggy releases I played feel even more relatable now, that’s for sure). I also have to wonder if there are some good programming practices that can help you to tackle this complexity and mitigate bug-related immersion breaking, because I sure didn’t use any of that. Hell, I barely even used exception handling. The way I see it, if something goes unexpectedly wrong, you’re screwed either way.

The graphics are probably cheap and lame, though

That’s what I was ready for. Braced myself for, even. I knew from the start that visuals were my weakest spot, and although I made some decisions to lower the difficulty settings (like confining the story to just a handful of small rooms or settling on the fixed camera), my design skills were still close to zero, and I hadn’t even modeled a simple table in Blender before.

At first I thought I’d just cobble up whatever I can from free assets – and indeed, some of the Asset Store’s most popular free items made it to the final build and now sit proudly in the middle of my screenshots. However, as I went ahead and familiarized myself with the basics of 3d modeling, I found out they had more to do with math than with design or drawing. Now, math, not only did I have experience in it – math was like a good old friend.

So I took my trusty ruler that was going back to my high school days (though I’m sure any other ruler could do fine too… it just happened to be lying around, really) and started measuring the furniture in my apartment, using real world as my definitive reference. To my delight, soon I was able to model a table, and a bookshelf, and a sofa, and even an office chair too. I even found myself preferring to make simple models from scratch rather than searching for good free versions online – as long as I could manipulate vertices individually and rely strictly on coordinates rather than on any kind of artistry, I was fine.

As for the colors and lighting and general aesthetics, I mostly decided to just grind for it, i.e. to keep googling for cool interior design ideas and then moving stuff around until my internal critic stops hating it. To a certain extent it worked, though I certainly wouldn’t recommend this approach to anyone who needs more than a handful of small indoor areas. I have also utterly failed at utilizing any of the modern graphic enhancements like linear color space, post-rendering effects, or Unity 5 lightmapping, but even without it the environments look more or less pleasing, and that is certainly more than I hoped for in the beginning.

The character models, however… oh, boy, the character models are a whole different matter. I used an open-source thing called MakeHuman, which is honestly awesome and takes care of the base models and rigs, but I still had to do stuff like clothing and skin texturing, which took ages, and frankly, I’m still dissatisfied with the results.

They just aren’t appealing. Some of them look old and tired and beaten and functioning on way too little amount of sleep. You might even call them ugly. Granted, some of those folks are supposed to look ugly and tired and beaten, but justifying your lack of artistic sense with the story can only take you that far. Right now, though, I don’t think I can improve them any further – not without spending many more months on polishing my skills, anyway. There are points in time when one just has to accept one’s own limitations.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature

Some of those story-based justifications, though? Some of them I’m pretty proud of. They felt less like excuses and more like genuine opportunities, helping me to turn my limitations into strengths in ways I couldn’t even consider beforehand.

For one, despite the fact that the game is set in the future, none of my environments were very futuristic. On the contrary, apart from the screens hanging in mid-air, one Minority Report-wannabe character waving his hands at them, and holographic keyboards that detect your touches without any gloves (which should be possible thanks to that smart thing I googled called “acoustic radiation force”), they looked just like something you’d encounter today.

At first I thought it was an inevitable restriction, since recreating real-life objects from reference images was the best I could do, but then I realized: doesn’t it actually make perfect sense story-wise? Isn’t it realistic for the not-so-distant future to look almost exactly the same as the present? I took my 30-year time jump from Back to the Future II, but didn’t we just recently muse how 2015 turned out much more boring and mundane than they imagined in 1985?

What started as a limitation of my design skills suddenly turned into a statement I now support with all my heart: it’s not about the looks. The science fiction of the past depicted us in weird garments riding flying cars filled with flashy technology, but when the time came, we were wearing the same clothes, living in the same houses, eating the same food, yet, thanks to the internet, our way of interacting with reality – how we learn, socialize, make decisions – was fundamentally changed. It will never be about flying cars. The most profound changes can’t be seen with the naked eye.

Another example would be my quest for the perfect urban vista. Very early in the development I decided that I’d need an image of a fancy metropolis seen from a high point – just one shot, but it’d have to satisfy a number of conditions:

be a Creative Commons image, just like everything else I look for, so I can use it freely with my zero budget;

be clear, fairly high-res, and cool-looking;

give off the vibe of being on top of the world, since this would be a view from the headquarters of a very powerful corporation, and feeling on top of the world becomes an important plot point in the final chapter;

(this one’s a real kicker) I will need a daytime variant and a nighttime variant, both shot from the same angle, since the room where you see it will act as a hub where the main characters start in the mornings and chill in the evenings.

So, after a lot of internet searching (dictated, of course, by the fact that I couldn’t even begin to imagine how to make one from scratch myself) only one example satisfied my needs: the famous view from Victoria Peak in Hong Kong.

Now, using an image from 2010s for a story set in 2040s wasn’t an issue thanks to my convenient realization from before (there’s even an optional in-game explanation I shoehorned in that talks how Hong Kong’s bay area was already densely developed by 2010s and therefore didn’t see much construction work since then, and how you should totally visit Shenzhen or Guangzhou nearby to see a real difference). However, it posed a problem of a different kind: the game’s events would need to be set in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, I didn’t want to set my events anywhere at all – I wanted to just skip mentioning places, since it wasn’t important to the story, and to avoid any semblance of politics; to show a world so united and interconnected that your geographical location didn’t really matter.

However, as I turned to write another thing I really wanted to include – text articles imitating real news but describing hypothetical events that might happen in 2046 – I realized that freedom to talk about specific places makes it so much easier. Before long, I was mentioning Jakarta and Minsk and Addis Ababa and Istanbul, but not in a political, “this region still has such-and-such problems” way, but in a positive, “look how huge the world is, and how great it is to be aware of it” way. It really turned into an all-around better world-building, and it was a seemingly unrelated design challenge that helped to arrive there.

The pure awesomeness that is Creative Commons

My use of free assets went well beyond Hong Kong photos and 3d models from Unity Asset Store. I know there’s a number of reasons why one might want to avoid such things (like sacrificing your game’s uniqueness or accidentally violating somebody else’s intellectual rights), but since I was going into this alone and with no budget, embracing it instead felt like the only sensible course of action. I counted on the great collective consciousness of the internet to help me every step of the way – and boy, was I not disappointed. It’s absolutely amazing how much cool stuff people share online not just for free, but free for commercial use too.

First of all, you might already know this, but the amount of mind-blowingly beautiful photos in public domain these days is staggering. At first I came across an American photographer Jay Mantri, looking for a window view from my protagonist’s little office, and was seriously impressed with his work. Then I found Unsplash, where dozens of photographers share even more dazzling stuff. Then there was Pixabay, which might just be the definitive library of free images that collects all shots from the guys above and much more.

Since then, these places managed to satisfy 90% of my needs. I wanted images to illustrate abstract topics like dangers of immortality, emergence of artificial intelligence, ever-growing corporate power, or huge economic inequality – Pixabay had them. I wanted creepy child drawings – Pixabay had dozens. I wanted 10-15 black-and-white photos that look like a part of the same collection – Pixabay delivered. I wanted crisp, breath-taking shots full of vivid colors to decorate a bright orange room – probably half of the stuff at Unsplash is like that.

I also have to mention freesound.org, though using free sounds is probably much more common for indie video games, since coming up with necessary audio in your own studio is one heck of a weird creative challenge (at least that’s what I started to think after this video stuck with me).

But my greatest find is undoubtedly the soundtrack. Initially I had a naive thought of trying to create one myself (not properly composing, of course, since I had zero experience in that, but maybe playing around with loops and presets to come up with some simple yet pleasing tunes), and I even treated myself to a cheap synthesizer under the pretense of wanting to pick up music as a hobby anyway.

Naturally, this idea quickly died down once I realized that I’m incapable of “simply playing around” without understanding the basics, and understanding the basics would delay my release for another year at the very least. So I left the synthesizer standing in the corner (though I’m going back to practicing any day now, promise), turned to my old friend Google, and emerged more powerful than I could possibly imagine.

Mind you, it wasn’t a fast process, but as long as I was willing to spend hours upon hours carefully sifting through all instrumental music of suitable genres, I was repeatedly rewarded with truly awesome finds. Forget just “pleasing tunes” – with this amount of content I could start only with the tracks I personally loved, and then pick them to specifically fit the current mood of the story. After about 6 months of on-and-off searching and thousands of little choices (which probably sounds cooler than it was; most of them were made in 20-30 seconds, after all) I ended up with 2.5-hour-long soundtrack; a pretty extensive selection for a game that will last you 8-9 hours tops.

Of course, I don’t want to sound too one-sided; there are definitely upsides to composing your music from scratch, as well as downsides to using free music I might not be aware of (if my game gets decent exposure, maybe some of those creators will eventually ask me to remove their work, who knows). At the moment, however, I still feel mightily impressed with just how much quality material is already willingly shared online, and what a win-win it could be to use it in your indie game.

My biggest treasure trove was Free Music Archive, followed by ccMixter. Bandcamp and Soundcloud have even more stuff, but I don’t think there’s any way to filter that stuff by license. Your friendly neighborhood r/ccmusic is totally awesome too, with both creators and dedicated searchers constantly posting new links to wherever the music might be.

And, you might already know this too, but the main license to look for is CC-BY, or attribution-only. CC-BY-NC (non-commercial) is pretty self-explanatory, unless it’s F2P games with optional purchases; then I have no idea. CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-ND are probably a no-go, though it’s all very vague and depends on how you apply “adaptation” and “collection” terms to video games, but music is more of a no-go than the rest, since synchronizing audio to video is specifically defined as adaptation. There’s also CC0, or Public Domain (rare for music but quite common for photos and images), which may be useful if you are unable to give credit for some reason, but otherwise it’s probably a good idea to mention the original author regardless.

Any thoughts on time management and work-life balance?

I’m afraid I can mostly just repeat the obvious here. Listening to your body and respecting its natural rhythms is good. Burning out is bad: it affects not only you personally but the quality of everything you make as well. I’m a big fan of adding work to your hours instead of adding hours to your work; a fan to a fault, really, since it always makes me stressed if I spend even one day on something ultimately useless, but it also helps to keep my wastefulness to a relative minimum.

Another classic I can personally attest to is the importance of exercising (or just staying active if you already have physical activity incorporated into your daily routine or your hobbies). I had countless days when my thinking was kickstarted by a jog on a treadmill, taking me from “ugh, kinda not feeling it today” to “wait, I think I got this” in a matter of hours, helping me from the first drafts of the story to this very article. Some of it probably was just endorphins changing my perspective to a more positive one, but not all of it, and I can say with certainty that the line between a well-functioning body and a well-functioning mind is incredibly thin.

I turned into quite a running addict these past years, not in a sense of how much I do it (in fact, it’s the opposite: I do it only twice a week, and I barely even meet the recommended guidelines), but because of my body’s increased reliance on it, and its immediate symptomatic revolt if I dare to delay my scheduled fix even for a few days. It made me think just how good we are at getting utterly dependent on various stuff (whether it’s smoking, exercise, smartphones, or electricity), and how many psychological similarities can be found between self-destructive behavior and the so-called “healthy” habits. On the plus side, these ideas helped to shape Chapter 4 of my game, the one I completed the last and now feel the most proud of.

One common notion I could probably challenge a bit is the idea of working fixed hours. Most sources highlight the importance of picking a schedule and sticking to it, and while it’s definitely a great way to prevent burn-out and reduce the taxing amount of decisions one has to make every day, I never really felt comfortable with the “sticking” part. Isn’t it ultimately incompatible with how creative thinking works, and isn’t it better to take advantage of the “indie” part and stay as flexible as possible? So if you feel on fire, maybe allow yourself to get overworked a bit, since you could finish in hours what otherwise would take you days. And if you feel the opposite, just let it all go for a few days. We are not machines, after all; we are a chaotic unpredictable mess of thoughts, and that’s probably okay.

How about marketing or community building?

During the years of actual development? None whatsoever. In fact, you might have already noticed that I went against quite a few of common wisdoms, like:

start spreading the word early, write blogs, share stuff;

get a lot of feedback, bounce ideas, talk with people;

don’t go all out with your first game, make it small and manageable;

Was it the right decision to ignore points 1 and 2? Who knows. But, being painfully aware of my own strengths and weaknesses, I believe it was the most realistic decision for me. To be honest, I’m a somewhat obsessive person prone to overthinking stuff, and once I really start a thing, I have trouble stopping (it’s even there in the username). I knew for a fact I wouldn’t be able to write a really good story if I started to do marketing – I’d be too distracted by that tweet I should write this Saturday or that feedback somebody left me on Friday.

Most people, I imagine, have different modes of writing. They can think carefully about every word if it’s something important, or just type it as it comes. Me, I only have one. It doesn’t matter if you’re an old friend getting in touch or a potential employer defining years of my future – chances are, I’ll stare at the screen for 20-30 minutes before I hit “Send”. I imagine most people are also trying to fight these manifestations of excessive perfectionism, since it’s kind of a pain and a drain on your time. As for me, well, after years of stressing out I now mostly just accept it. It has its upsides, and working on a single game for years seems like a good way to put them to use.

To my defense, though, I was really planning to stick with point 3. I thought that I had a fairly realistic plan on my hands; a game with a singular focus that doesn’t even dare to excel at anything else. My first and most naive estimates included finishing it all in nary 6 months. But, of course, software development doesn’t work this way, and writing novel-long cohesive texts apparently don’t either. 6 months quickly turned into 12, 12 into 18, and then kept slowly but surely expanding every step of the way.

Interestingly enough, though, at no point did I feel like I was going out of scope or getting buried by feature creep. Frustrated by how long everything takes and what a slowpoke I am? Sure, more times than I can remember. But I always felt it had more to do with the nature of any sufficiently complex project rather than my unrealistic planning, and countless examples of noteworthy gamedev teams going out of time or budget seemed to support that. As Lord Gaben famously said, these things, they take time.

There’s a quote by Neil Gaiman (who has a ton of great advice that’s applicable not only to book writing but any kind of creative endeavor), and it goes like this: “Finish what you started. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.” I think it’s one of the quotes that really managed to motivate me. A kind of a mindset I was for the majority of my development time, even. I already started. Set the wheels in motion. And once the wheels are in motion, you only have 2 options: finish it, and then maybe nobody else will care, or drop it, and then definitely nobody else will care. When you put it that way, it’s a very easy choice, right?

Fascinating, but let’s wrap this up already

So there you have it. A significant amount of something, followed by something else. I’m sure the second “something” will be even more unpredictable than the first one, but will ostensibly include months of marketing attempts, good old post-project depression, as well as some hopefully not-completely-pointless job-searching (indie freedom is intoxicating, but I think it would do me good to work in a team for a change).

Even if it all turns out to be as frustrating as possible, though, I think I’m stubborn enough to not let it diminish the first part’s value. As the great Neil Peart from the great band Rush said in one of their many great songs, the point of the journey is not to arrive. So if you don’t mind a cheesy one-liner to send this wall of text off, it goes something like this:

I guess that’s all we can do in this random world. Make the journey count.

P.S. If any of this sounds like a game you might like, please consider supporting it on Greenlight, or check it out on itch.io where both demo and full versions for Windows are available. You can also follow me on Twitter, where I post gifs and images coupled with oh-so-mysterious quotes from the game, or on Facebook (where I haven’t posted a single thing yet, to be honest, but will certainly rectify that sooner or later). Thanks!

I'm happy to see more games that focus on having a strong narrative. I do wonder about the market size for such games and I hope there are enough people to justify the development of said games, because I do wish to see this market grow.

I do think the Art is the weakest element here, and might detract attention from an otherwise good game.

Wholeheartedly agreed on every point. I think that the uncertainty of said market size is something I've already felt clearly and will continue to feel as I try to promote this. During my first 48 hours on Greenlight, I didn't get a single negative comment yet about 2/3 of votes were "no", and though not statistically representative, I think it's pretty telling of how many people might have "eh, just not my thing" reaction.

That is a very interesting and detailed reaction! Thank you for taking the time to share it. I'll try to respond to your points one-by-one below - not to show that I disagree with them (I do, but that's just my personal opinion, and I definitely don't consider it any more valid than yours), but because I didn't even have this kind of conversations about my game with anyone yet, and I want to share with you my thoughts in return.

The problem with story games, is that a lot of game developers try to well, tell a story.

I honestly don't see it as a problem. You describe what people want, but that's just an educated guess on your part. There are all kinds of people wanting all kinds of things, and sure, some groups are much less numerous, but that doesn't mean we should disregard them.

Video games are a medium that allows to tell a story, therefore you can use it in such way, as simple as that. It doesn't need any special justification or unique approach to set it apart from books or movies, because it will always be a little unlike them just by being a different medium, and there will be players who might grow fond of these differences (like people who might prefer visual novels over books because they also have art and music, even though their approach to storytelling is almost identical).

Similarly, the idea that a book will have much higher quality of writing is a generalization - there are all kinds of books, and all kinds of games. Writing is writing; it doesn't get automatically better or worse depending on the medium... or maybe it does if we speak statistically, but is it even possible to have reliable statistics on such a highly subjective thing?

I get the very distant impression that you have a very in-depth story to tell and my god, you will force it down the player's throat, if that is what it takes to get your message and point of view heard.

You know, that is exactly what I tried NOT to do with my story. The only clear-cut message I want to carry across is that every aspect of our world and our existence is incredibly complicated, and you should be wary of anyone who offers you clear-cut messages (and even that is presented in the least patronizing or overbearing way I could manage). As they say, all generalizations are false, including this one.

none of your characters looked like they were "alive" or had any personality.

Your ideas about what makes characters "alive" or have personalities feel very alien to me. For me, interesting personalities are achieved through good writing. Sure, things like voice acting / different animations / meaningful choices might help with the immersion and emotional connection, but if the core is not there, nothing else matters. A boring two-dimensional villain is unlikely to become better even if he is voiced by a world-class actor and can meet wildly different ends depending on your decisions. And on the contrary, an interesting character should remain interesting regardless of the route you take and even if you play the game muted.

Were your NPCs fully voiced acted?

No, there isn't a single voiced line in the game, just text. To be honest, I always viewed voice acting as something that will rather ruin than enhance the experience unless you can ensure that it's done really well. Took a cue from visual novels again, I guess.

I get the very distant impression of long drawn out cut scenes...

I don't think anything in my game can be considered a cut scene, really. All that zooming you see in the trailer is just to avoid overly static screens - in the game, you have control 99% of the time, even if that "control" consists of merely clicking on something or pausing.

Another golden rule, about RPGs at least, is don't overwelm the player with a ton of lore at the start of the game

I'm not sure why you got the impression that this game has a lot of obligatory lore-reading. There is exposition, sure, but a lot of it is optional, since RPG dialogues are very suitable for choosing just how many details you want to learn and/or skip. The closest thing I have to lore (news articles) is also completely optional and won't even steal a second of your time unless you decide to click on the corresponding object.

Boring the player with infodumps or inane facts is something that I was very mindful about, and hopefully managed to avoid. All of the little text bits you see in the story trailer are directly related to the characters' stories, and I tried my best to make those stories relatable on a personal level (though, of course, it's entirely possible that my trailer fails to convey it). Making the player care should be your first priority, on that I completely agree with you.

Lastly, my personal opinion, is that it's really difficult to do "humor" right in video games. Everyone has a different sense of it and even if you do it right, there is no replay value.

This game has no replay value at all, humor or otherwise. It's the kind of game you finish in 5-6 hours and then (ideally) stay impressed for days, or just move on to other things otherwise. The only reason to play throught it again is the same reason one might want to rewatch a movie or re-read a book.

Also text only is more difficult, I think it was Senifield that said something like "90% of the joke comes from tone and timing", which I think is lost in text.

I agree, text-only mode is like an additional restriction here, but surely there are some books / articles / posts that you find funny. I think that good text is capable to produce a distinct "tone" in your head all by itself, though I don't claim that my text has managed to achieve this level of quality.

But yeah, all in all, I think it just illustrates how different our views on this matter are (even though we both claim to like story-driven games), and it's a good reminder to never assume that one's idea of a good game will be shared by everyone else.

We really do kinda speak different languages, don't we? :) How should put it... I meant that the messages and choices are not clear-cut from the narrative perspective, not from the gameplay perspective. I.e., mechanically, it's all very simplistic and doesn't affect the flow of the narrative that much. But if you put yourself in the characters' shoes and consider their options, there will be no right or wrong answers. I'm really not sure how else to explain that fixed != clear-cut.

If you don't like the media of video games, no one is forcing you to use it.

I love the medium of video games, it's just that I'm not a big fan of narrowing it down to our own subjective definitions of what a video game is. It has a potential to be so much wider and include so many different design approaches we haven't even begun to explore yet.

To say it's "alien" is bull crap.

I said "alien to me", not alien in general, and I actually agree with almost everything you wrote in that paragraph. I think you're establishing a false dichotomy here, as well as utilizing good old straw man.

You have tools to use to create character in your characters: models, animations, voice, visuals, etc. I find it odd that you say they don't matter.

I didn't say they don't matter at all - I said that, for a story-driven experience, they don't matter as much as the core writing, and you can still try to make a good game with them being minimalistic or even absent, which is cool if you have very limited resources at your disposal. I think I explained that in the article as well.

Maybe people aren't "impressed" by your "brilliance"

What brilliance? Where did I ever mention brilliance?

no offense, but you are the one complaining about lack of green light votes and getting a lot of 'no's.

There was absolutely zero complaining in that comment. I mentioned my greenlight stats solely as an illustration of the same point you're making now: that the majority of people will indeed want a video game to be "more video game-ish". You then wrote a general description of what you think makes a good story-driven game, which I found really interesting and decided to respond in kind.

If you intention was to just make a lot of assumptions and put me into your convenient box of oh-so-offended-that-my-awesome-game-didn't-pass-greenlight-in-2-days people instead, we probably shouldn't continue this.

Ah, my mistake then, I thought we were having a more theoretical discussion on what makes a good story-driven game, since this comment thread started with a general remark on the state of narrative games, and your response also started with a general observation. If that was intended as feedback to my specific situation, I probably should've just thanked you and stopped there... it is indeed can be quite off-putting when the player's criticism is met with a wall of text on how everything is actually an integral part of the developer's vision.

On a related note, since you mentioned "two way street" approach, can you tell me how you practice it and how you approach feedback yourself? Specifically, where do you draw the line between "I should really follow on that and accommodate it as much as I can" and "I should just accept that my game is what it is"? I'm asking this because ideally I'd like to find some middle ground between "two way street" and "this is my vision".

The problem with stories, is a lot of game developers try to well, tell a story.

It's not so obvious, but when people start a video game they want to interact with the world and let a story develop, not be told a story... otherwise they would just watch a movie that will have much high production value (or read a book which would have much higher quality of writing).

It's a delicate balance... to have to player involved and engaged.

To give some constrictive criticism:

I've only watched your trailer, but I get the very distant impression that you have a very in-depth story to tell and my god, you will force it down the player's throat, if that is what it takes to get your message and point of view heard. [Continued...]

2d stuff like photos or textures is free for commercial use, yeah (unless it's something trivial or minimalistic that I could make by myself in GIMP). 3d meshes for the environments are mostly done from scratch, though they're all pretty simplistic. Character models are generated by MakeHuman and then tinkered with to include clothes / hair and such.

Normally I would advise people to tighten up their text, but despite its length yours is rather good.

As for the game, my first impression is that it seems ambitious for a freshman effort, yet possibly solid. The graphics are rather good, although it's not clear how much of a unique artistic vision there is behind them (unique artistic vision catches people's attention). You're supporting Linux, too, so all in all you get my vote. If you can add a Mac to your build and QA farm in the future you should consider macOS, too, as story games without high system requirements seem to do pretty well there.

Also, as people might already have advised you, Scrum works fine if you don't have a command-and-control bureaucracy running it tightly from the top down. It's not meant for that, but organizations with that kind of culture get hold of it and want to bend it their purposes just like they want to bend the team(s).

If you can add a Mac to your build and QA farm in the future you should consider macOS, too, as story games without high system requirements seem to do pretty well there.

That is a very useful piece of information for me, I appreciate it. My problem with macOS is a very mundane one: I don't have a Mac machine myself, nor any acquaintances to borrow it from, and buying even a cheap one just to make a build seems unreasonable, at least until I'm able to generate decent sales on Windows / Linux (which, of course, might never happen at all). Also, I'm afraid I have no idea what "QA farm" is.

Also, as people might already have advised you, Scrum works fine if you don't have a command-and-control bureaucracy running it tightly from the top down.

Ah, yes, that was intended more as a harmless joke than a legit criticism of Scrum, even though it does sound like a thinly veiled criticism. I think that's the only place in the game where I allowed myself to make such an obvious satirical jab; most of the time I'm very mindful about jokes that rely on superficial judgment.

The reason why I indulged in it here is because I had very negative experience with Scrum during my last employment (the .NET MVC one mentioned in the article, the one that fell apart). The core of that "falling apart" was exactly a severe and extremely premature bureaucratization under the banner of "possible future expansion" (they tried to introduce Scrum to a team of 3 developers working in the same room, which felt ridiculously redundant). Of course, I fully realize that it had more to do with our manager's incompetence than with Scrum itself, and I wouldn't mind to work in a team with a more mild and reasonable implementation of it.

A build farm is the pool of machines where your Continuous Integration happens; where each new code commit automatically gets built. QA farm is just an extension of that, where the QA automation runs tests. It's often the same pool of machines as the build farm. Not all of these techniques are common in gamedev yet.

Yes, it's an extension of version control. The keywords you want are "Continuous Integration" and "Continuous Delivery", sometimes called CI/CD. I'm slightly surprised you haven't encountered it in the enterprise realm, especially if they were professing to do some form of Agile.

CI/CD is most useful when you have more than one or two developers. Even with a small team, though, setting the CI/CD up to build simultaneously on all platforms and check for build regressions and performance regressions is a huge velocity enabler.

Fantastic write up! I really enjoyed reading about your experience making a game, it's always inspiring to read about someone else's struggles and triumphs and to let them motivate you. Seems like you've made yourself a really unique game. Thank you very much for taking the time to write and share this.

If/when you take another stab at making a game, would you stick to the same genre? Or do you feel like you are done with making this type of game? After 3 years I feel like I would want to try something new, but I know that at the same time, if you love what you're doing, it can always feel 'new'.

Thank you for your kind response! I'm glad that my article was able to have a motivational effect on somebody; I think that's one of the best reasons to write this kind of things.

After 3 years I feel like I would want to try something new, but I know that at the same time, if you love what you're doing, it can always feel 'new'.

Theoretically speaking, both of this sound good to me. I loved the process of imagining my own story-driven game and then slowly turning it into a real thing, and I'd love to do it again, now with more experience behind my back. I even have some vague ideas about a "spiritual successor" (if such a mighty phrase can even be applied to a game that doesn't have a single sale yet). At the same time, I strongly believe in trying lots of new things in this life, so if I ever get an opportunity to make something different but really cool, I'd probably grab it.

In general, though, I think that my future in game development will be defined by things I can only influence but not fully control, like whether my game gets some following or dies in obscurity, and what kind of financial situation I might find myself in the near future.

Congratulations on getting your game to the Greenlight stage! For a year I've been mulling starting a hard sci-fi adventure game, so it's encouraging seeing someone reach the other end.

I know you said you didn't get a lot of feedback or talk with people during the development, but did you ever give your story to an editor or just someone who reads a lot of sci-fi?

Your gameplay trailer is much better than the "main" trailer, and I almost wonder if you'd be better served without the latter. It makes it look like the point of the game is to click on objects to select them.

As for the art - well, I'm a programmer, not an artist, but I think the environments would look quite decent with better lighting. The way they're lit now makes them look fake - there is some shading, but nothing seems to cast a shadow? Besides the office, the other rooms just need some more stuff to look lived in - clutter, maybe some books not on the shelf, papers on desks, small decorations (knick-knacks), etc.

did you ever give your story to an editor or just someone who reads a lot of sci-fi?

No, I didn't have anybody like that around me, to be honest. I tried to mitigate it by looking for a lot of "indirect feedback", i.e. searching for similar story elements in other media and discussions around them (TV Tropes is an extremely helpful place in that regard), but, of course, only time will tell if it was enough or not.

It makes it look like the point of the game is to click on objects to select them.

Well, speaking in purely mechanical terms, that's really all you do in this game. But that trailer's sole purpose is to make you intrigued with the story; all gameplay-related actions are secondary there. I actually had a case of an exactly opposite feedback in a Marketing Monday thread some time ago (that my story trailer is indeed pretty intriguing, while my gameplay trailer doesn't add anything new to the table), and to be honest, I still can't make up my mind.

The way they're lit now makes them look fake - there is some shading, but nothing seems to cast a shadow?

Besides the office, the other rooms just need some more stuff to look lived in

I agree with both of your points; these could certainly make the environments better. I think the pitfall I fell into here is a sort of psychological "imprinting", i.e. I was tinkering with the rooms endlessly until I no longer hated them, but once that happened, I just stopped wanting to change anything else and didn't really bother with additional details. That, and I also couldn't utilize Unity 5 lightmapping, since processing those calculations again and again on my 2 GB RAM potato was way too painful.

I also couldn't utilize Unity 5 lightmapping, since processing those calculations again and again on my 2 GB RAM potato was way too painful.

But you could still do that, right?

Find a friend with a stronger computer, and see if you can use it in the evenings if you supply the beer. Rent one for a week. Or, find an artist willing to tune everything for credit in the game.

I suspect you feel at this point the game is done, and now it's up to the public to judge. I'd argue, based on what I've seen and the feedback you've gotten, that you have a bit further to go in your journey. Your game will be stronger and better received with more polish.

But that trailer's sole purpose is to make you intrigued with the story

I didn't understand what the trailer was trying to say, the first time. Only after reading more about the game, and watching the trailer again, did I realize the text wasn't you (the developer) telling me about the game - it was quotes from the game. And not just the protagonist, but it was quotes from many different characters.

Now that I understand what the trailer is, I agree it's intriguing, though it's missing a hook. There must be tension or drama in your story - can you build a trailer around that without spoiling it?

There must be tension or drama in your story - can you build a trailer around that without spoiling it?

Very good question. I think the basic premise that's supposed to raise the tension is actually not in the trailer but in the description (the "he's supposed to die earlier but can skip that" part), while the trailer touches on that very briefly. I kinda assumed that having that description nearby (whether it's a store page or a video description on YouTube) would be enough, but maybe it wasn't a very safe assumption.

I suspect you feel at this point the game is done, and now it's up to the public to judge. I'd argue, based on what I've seen and the feedback you've gotten, that you have a bit further to go in your journey. Your game will be stronger and better received with more polish.

Then I have a more theoretical question for you, if you don't mind: where would you draw the line between further polishing and letting go? The feedback I've got is fairly varied, as feedback goes: some say that the visuals are good enough, some say otherwise, while some mention that it's not about visuals at all and there are some other things they'd rather focus on in my place. I mean, there will always be room for improvement, and there will always be people who dislike or downright hate your game. I guess I worry that I might spend another 2-3 (4-6?) months on polishing just to utterly fail with marketing anyway, since the game will be discarded by many for much more general reasons, like not enjoying text-heavy games and such.

All true, and in general there's no good answer. Polishing a game has diminishing returns. I wouldn't suggest, in general, spending another 2-6 months on it.

However, lightmaps seem like low hanging fruit; the improvement could be disproportionately large compared to the time it would take. It's not like you chose not to use them for artistic reasons, or because you weren't skilled enough or lacked the time to even try. The only reason was a lack of RAM.

Yeah, good points. To elaborate a bit more on lightmapping: I dropped it partially because of slowness and partially because whatever settings I tried it looked either the same or worse (even the shadows didn't seem to add much), so maybe a certain lack of skill / understanding was present too. Perhaps I should try my luck at r/Unity3D or Unity forums, showing my screenshots and asking for suggestions about light sources placement and settings.

I love old russian (soviet) sci-fi classics. Im a HUGE fan of Tarkovskij (Stalker / Solaris), Strugackij brothers and Gluchovskij... and i am hungnry to know more and more authors. Good luck with your game, hope one day i can play it XD

ps. and, obviously, i am a fan of the Stalker and Metro videogames sagas. They make me know the books i love today.

Amazing article, thank you for taking the time to write it. This has come along at just the right time for me as I'm working on a very similar game and have been for about 4 months now. But progress feels so slow in this kind of game because it's so difficult to actually produce content on-top of all the systems you need to produce to make the content do anything.

The fact that this took you three years shows me that I have a lot of hard work ahead of me, a lot more than I'd initially thought when I set out to make a point and click adventure. I'd initially set aside a year, but the trouble I'm having procuring content, and writing, and art on-top of the implementation work means I can see it easily spilling over into multiple years unless I start making some hard decisions and better motivating myself. Especially as I'm having to do it around a full-time job.

Thank you! I really appreciate your response, and I wish you all the luck with your own development as well.

I think you probably shouldn't worry too much about how long it takes you, especially if you have a job with a stable income. There is this uncomfortable notion that video games are fleeting things, and that every passing year you spend on one makes it more and more outdated, and that nobody will care about your game 12 months after release, but I'm sure r/patientgamers can confirm that the opposite notion also holds merit.

I felt really motivated recently after seeing that Tim Schafer's interview where he talks how Psychonauts make more money now that when it launched in 2005. And although our games most likely won't be as awesome or well-received or long-living as Psychonauts, that doesn't mean they can't be genuinely enjoyed by an occasional gamer or two many years from now, even after we move on to other things. So take your time and make something you feel proud of - it will be the best support pillar once you start sharing it with the world. That's how I feel about it right now, anyway.

I have something resembling a blog on Tumblr, though it's very eclectic and I tend to post once in a blue moon. I'd love to be able to write more, though, so maybe there's hope for that blog yet if I manage to subdue my "overthinking problem".

Thanks! It was a bit of a pain to make those meshes for every character, but on the bright side, it looks better than any real outline shader I could find (I never even tried to program my own shaders).

From the trailer the game seems verry sullen about the color and temp do not mesh with. Change in color temp (there are theories and courses on how color pallet for movies provide the added emotion) or even darkening the game may help atmosphere. I feel like this also would be great as a 2d animated game.

Do you have any good reading recommendations on this kind of theories? I'm pretty ignorant in that regard (read some really fascinating books about presentation design back in the day, but that's very tangential), and I sure wouldn't mind to educate myself a bit.

I see, thank you. Well, if you ever get a chance and it's not much trouble, I'd greatly appreciate it, but don't trouble yourself too much. After all, enough googling will probably get me there in the end.

nah it is not much of an issue he loves talking about composition shots and the like. So I am sure he would love to talk about color theory again. plus it is interesting. i should see him tonight or tomorrow so saturday or sunday you should have something.

I loved reading your process, and really like the direction of your focus: narrative. I think not enough indie games have strong narrative focus. Everyone want to make the cool gameplay, which is of course fine. But narrative always seems to be left behind, because, as you found out, it's quite asset intensive.

My main critique is not actually the art as you feared. It's your promo videos. In a narrative game, I want to be able to read what I'm buying into. I had a hard time reading fast enough to keep up with your video. The text in the gameplay? Sure skim over that. But the feature text titles should be on screen a bit longer. The rule of thumb is the time it takes you to read it roughly 3 times is how long it should be on the screen.

Thank you! I agree with your points, and that rule of thumb sounds very convenient. I'm not sure I'll find the moral strength to revamp my story trailer (it will have to be a significant revamping, since most of it is timed to the music right now), but if I do, I'll keep that in mind.

I don't think you necessarily need to go back and revamp right away. But if you find yourself struggling with marketing, maybe throwing together a new video or tweaking and old one can help. Less can also be more :) But it's always hard when you have so much you want to show off, deciding which bits to cut and which to keep XD

Seriously? That's a bummer, I thought all of their systems were working almost flawlessly, judging by how I didn't encounter a single problem while releasing there. Well, I think I have a decent chance to get greenlit (279 "yes" votes and 34 followers at the moment), so hopefully Steam release is not too far away as well.

Having now read your post fully (it is a whopper!), I almost want to collab with you on a game project aha. Our thinking when it comes to story-driven games is quite similar, there's definitely a lack of indie games that take the narrative as the premise and run with it.

I put this down to it being hard to build a game around a human narrative without needing a certain amount of fairly realistic human character models. of course this is why indie games tend towards a stylised presentation.

Hey, thanks for taking the time to read it all the way through! Your comment is very encouraging to me, especially since I frequently come across the opposite view: that games should stay mechanically-oriented, while story-driven experiences are better suited for books and movies.

I do believe that we're going to see more narrative games in the future, because both the tools and free assets will keep getting more and more convenient, accessible, and numerous. This will open the path to gamedev for those who want to do interactive storytelling but don't have a lot of mastery in programming and/or design (I'm kinda like this too, considering how heavily I relied on free art). Gonna get even more crowded, too, but then again, over-saturation is inevitable either way.

The character models, however… oh, boy, the character models are a whole different matter. I used an open-source thing called MakeHuman, which is honestly awesome and takes care of the base models and rigs, but I still had to do stuff like clothing and skin texturing, which took ages, and frankly, I’m still dissatisfied with the results.
They just aren’t appealing. Some of them look old and tired and beaten and functioning on way too little amount of sleep. You might even call them ugly. Granted, some of those folks are supposed to look ugly and tired and beaten, but justifying your lack of artistic sense with the story can only take you that far. Right now, though, I don’t think I can improve them any further – not without spending many more months on polishing my skills, anyway. There are points in time when one just has to accept one’s own limitations.

I think that's a very reasonable way to do things. Everyone can be responsible only for the thing they're really good at, but at the same time have complete control over it, so conflicting opinions will be fairly rare. I wouldn't have hesitated for a second to work with a proper artist myself, but since I didn't know anybody like that, finding a good companion felt like an even bigger challenge than trying to do art by myself.

LOL! Oh I'm sorry, I didn't realize that commenting on Reddit was "academic literature." But hey, if that's the case, maybe you should edit your above comment and put the period inside the close quote.

I wasn't the person who was being pseudo-intellectual by making audacious claims and criticizing the OP's English, so I don't know why you're acting like I should be the one with perfect English. I'm just calling you out on being a hypocrite. You're embarrassing yourself.

Actually, I never wanted to imply that I'm confident in my grammar (on the contrary, I think it's pretty average), just that I'm confident about writing decent texts. On that note, did you notice any specific grammar rules I'm breaking throughout the article? Some of them are just random slips (like that "don't-doesn't" example), but some of them might be things I really don't know properly. Not that I think that Reddit is obligated to teach me English, but, you know, pointers from somebody who is obviously serious about his grammar would be very helpful.

Hire a marketer, NOW. Why? Because if you want shade, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is right now.

By marketer, do you mean PR agency or just a team member who knows their stuff? Most of the guides I saw on this subreddit tend to recommend the opposite: contact the influencers / build the community yourself and don't spend any money unless it's a PAX booth.

PR agency. The notion that you can get any traction as a pure indie nowadays is misguided. Market is too saturated.

On grammar: you make the same mistakes that all non-native English speakers make: articles, and plurality.

But beyond that, it's about color - you've obviously got fluency in English, but you read like Dickens, or Melville - stuffy and intellectual and full of way too many words, all of which basically say "look at what an awesome writer I am." If it were code it'd be dense and over architected, with lots of lambdas and fancy design patterns.

Read Story by Robert McKee. Then write a short screenplay and get friends to stage it. You'll see it.

Or, just hire someone who's spent as much time on the craft of writing as you have on programming.

Yeah, those are good points, thanks. I agree that I tend to get too self-indulgently verbose, and I did some progress on that front (the stuff I used to write 5 years ago makes me cringe today, in English and Russian alike), but I still have a long way to go. I'll definitely check out your book suggestion.